Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/04/06/the-free-sci-fi-ebook-i-found-last-week-was-great-now-for-the-next-one/

The science fiction story I found last week, see previous sci fi ebook post, as an inspiration for Traveller role-playing games seemed really good as soon as I found it, but it has gone on to exceed my high expectations for it. That it was an inventive setting which combined nanotechnology and medieval elements was obvious from the beginning and it just kept on adding interesting ideas to the mix. One of the pivotal plot points was the importance of what was called a language game, an attempt by artificial intelligences to invent their own language and language categories to be sure that they were not parroting human ideas. But it became a language whose categories became so different that the language become untranslatable to a human tongue – even in principle. I loved it, and it’s a great idea for a science-fiction role playing game as well.

I found both Ventus and Star Dragon on the this site dedicated to free ebooks of all genres and so I decided to go back to the same well and see if I could find yet another top-class slice of inspirational science fiction to use as part of my role-playing game world building and scenario designing process. It seems like I’m in luck. They have an ebook called Sunborn and it’s free, but only for a limited time. It seems to be nice hard edged science fiction and the .prc file is nicely done and even includes professional cover art for use on my virtual bookshelf. I’ll let you know what I thought of it in the next post.

My pages of resources for use with Traveller and other science fiction role-playing games haven’t grown very much lately, and all I can say is oops sorry. I have caught the fiction bug and when I’m not reading science fiction (free when possible, downloaded to my smartphone) I have been writing my own over-ambitious narrative. I’ll get it out of my system soon and get back to the RPG content and illustrations. I always come back to role-playing games and illustration eventually, it’s in my blood, and when I do it always seems that I’m energized by all the stuff I’ve been reading in the mean time. I hope that’s a more satisfying excuse than the fact that my real job, translation, has been keeping me too busy lately but that’s also true.

I’m living in Austria at the moment and me and my girlfriend just nipped over the border to Prague this weekend to be there when Obama gave his speech on nuclear disarmament. More photos at Kooky Photography It was a fascinating experience and Prague is a lovely and strange mixture: a refined and huge sprawling ancient European city with exquisite buildings and architecture which has been taken over by students, punks, tourists and other revelers. When you add the hordes of police, helicopters and motorcades associated with the presidential visit the city itself took on the feeling of a post apocalyptic role-playing game setting.